


what to say to the rising tides

by buckstiel



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Flashbacks, M/M, Martin's Yet-Unnamed Domain, Paranoia, Post-Episode 176, Sexual Content, The Extinction, The Eye
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:08:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25374391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: The end of the world is not new, but if this is the end of Martin's world, well--maybe he should have seen it coming.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 2
Kudos: 42





	what to say to the rising tides

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes this podcast makes me go full pepe silvia. so this is inspired by both my own pet theory of what martin's domain is and another compelling theory i saw floating around. 
> 
> title derived from "dead stars" by ada limon. (which is, incidentally, a great s5 jmart piece.)

After the woods comes a greyscale clearing dotted with dried skeletons of bushes, all twiggy enough to still offer a place to hide--at least from them, or at least him and Basira. Not from Jon, and certainly not from the unblinking beacon of the Panopticon rising high above the horizon. At one point this place might have been home to herds of woolly sheep, but Martin turns his thoughts away without aiming, and they bounce from the grime on the toe of his boots to the heavy press of leering eyes staring from the forest’s edge and then finally ahead of him, to Basira and Jon and the hushed, tense sniping under their breaths. 

When he strains his ears to eavesdrop, his head goes fuzzy, something close to static that starts to arc a migraine-like pain behind his right eye. A supernatural curtain, okay, is there any real reason to still be surprised by the way this world twists itself into new shapes? 

So he sits on the grey, dusty earth, thinks back to the couch in The Extinction’s domain and exactly how much fear and pain he’d exchange for the chance to sit there again instead of on whatever this is--fine puffs of dirt and ash that coat his throat and turn his tongue metal in his mouth. The couch laid between mountains of abandoned detritus soaked in the kind of stench that only came with death past a certain magnitude, but it hadn’t dripped with it. Just a ratty couch, just another object that had done its duty and ended up on the curb, and Jon had stared like it had been an infected sore. 

There’s an instinct to wonder if he’s going crazy, but he’s seen nothing of Helen and her door since their run-in with Simon, so he pushes it down. That’ll come later, there will be time for that fear and every other one later. The loudest one, he’s got to suss out the one digging its fingers into his eardrums and sit with it, coax it down to a dull roar. 

He glances at Basira, gun in hand, glaring at Jon with her finger massaging the curve of the trigger. 

He glances at Jon, lips barely moving as he speaks faster than Martin’s ever seen him, even in the manic, paranoid weeks following the ordeal with Prentiss. What’s he telling her? What’s he telling her that he’s so deliberately held just out of Martin’s reach no matter how much he pleaded? He had a knife to his throat. The bit of broken skin offered more blood than Jon had offered answers. 

(Before the world turned grey, the land around Daisy’s safehouse bloomed green and thick, and the first sunny day they’d followed a shallow creek that wove around the back garden into a copse of trees. No reason, just something to do before the clouds rolled in again, and there was something so unspeakably overwhelming in watching Jon hold the clean Scottish air in his lungs. Like he was savoring it. Like Martin was savoring the view. He’d reached for Jon’s hand then, the very first time, and their fingers woven together gave Jon an anchor to tug Martin forward, knocking them into the tree behind him while Jon practically climbed up his large frame to kiss him--his cheek, his jaw, the bridge of his nose, finally his mouth in a desperation Martin had never realized was not just his own to carry.)

A sharp pang like a bruised rib catches Martin’s breath in his throat when he realizes he’s avoided meeting Jon’s gaze the closer they’ve trekked toward London. The pain ebbs and flows with his breathing, unavoidable; and like all the pain and fear in this place, he simply sits with it.

(Jon doesn’t like to be touched but he’ll kneel between Martin’s knees, watching his hands roam below the soft hill of his stomach, taking himself apart. Gently adding a hand on top of his, moving in unison, breaking off into a harmony, unexpected; and as Martin moans through it, he seeks out his eyes, heavy and warm, and there’s a link there, like if he were able to reach far enough his fingers would wrap around a doorknob, and beyond it laid the full expanse of everything Jon could see, including him, and the whole of it was more beautiful than he could have ever imagined. 

He didn’t actually come until later. Hadn’t realized that moment wasn’t it until then.)

Ahead of him, Basira hisses a point, gestures like she doesn’t have a gun in her hand, like she’s halfway to squeezing the trigger. The barrel presses into the dip of Jon’s bony chest. Stays there until Jon slaps it away and it discharges into the ground, a plume of dust rising from its crater. 

They’re strangers, suddenly. 

(His eighth birthday party was his last before his father left. It was the last time he remembers his mother smiling at him without it being a show for the neighbors or his teachers.)

They’re strangers. Do they even want to save this world, or do they just want to sink their teeth in and gaze into it further? How is he supposed to exist like this--not live, no, it’s not living when every person he’s ever loved is dead or tipping down the incline Jonah’s had his thumb on from the beginning. 

His thoughts slam to a halt when Basira calls his name. 

“Get up. We’re moving.” She strides ahead first, doesn’t check to see if they’re following but they do, after a moment.

Jon offers a weak smile and takes his hand. If he doesn’t think about it, it’s fine. If he doesn’t think about it, then Jon’s hand doesn’t sit against his palm like dry ice. 

*

The question of Daisy hangs in the air but no one other than Martin pays it a second glance. Behind the question of Daisy, stretching its legs against the barrier of that shadow, is the question of Melanie and Georgie, equally ignored. 

Instead of Jon and Basira’s bickering, there’s just their footsteps crunching along the path they’ve set for themselves. Basira still holds her gun halfway ready to shoot, and Jon still grips Martin’s hand like it’s the only anchor keeping him from zipping up into the clutches of The Vast. 

Martin feels the burn of his fingers between his and tries to remember when that heat was a blessing. A tongue in his mouth, a head laid against his slowing heartbeat, something to cut through the fog when it crept up behind his eyes. _I see you, I see you_. Jon’s thumb running under his eye, along his bottom lip and the inside of his cheek. Breathy half-words pulsed into his neck, quiet admissions of love before Jon could realize what he’d said. 

(And Martin, pulling back to hold Jon’s face in his hands, saying so forcefully it moonlighted as anger, “I _love you_ , Jonathan Sims.”)

He would follow Jon to the ends of the earth and thought that was where he was headed, leaving the cabin, but would he follow someone who looks like Jon but isn’t? There has to be a point where Jon isn’t Jon, a threshold for the Avatar of Theseus--was it when his leer tore Not-Sasha apart atom by atom, or when he’d curled so tightly around the statement of The Desolation that he tuned out everything roaring around him, or earlier even, their last night in the cabin when he’d begged Martin to fuck him despite all their lengthy discussions the weeks prior? 

They have a moment to themselves when Basira stops beside a stagnant lake to kneel and stare at--Martin tries not to guess, but Daisy’s face flashes up behind his eye anyway. Neither he nor Jon watches Basira’s process, glancing instead at the interlocking of their fingers, the way Jon’s thumb worries at the crest of Martin’s knuckle.

Martin wonders, not for the first time, what Jon can see of him without trying, without asking his permission; and almost as if to answer him, Jon’s brow collapses into a tense, pained thing. 

“I want you to know,” Jon says, quietly, “any time it looks like I’m risking your life, it’s because I know you’ll pull through. I’m not a gambling man.” 

Jon’s hand squeezes his, an almost painful latch against his bones. Burning. Dry ice. Supernatural trying to conceal its true nature, and still Martin swoops down to land an open-mouthed kiss, revels in the shuddered sigh that rolls over his tongue to the back of his throat. He’s only a man and his love may be a stranger but it’s still his love, and that counts for something. It has to, or it should. 

(There’s an itching at the back of Martin’s throat, his head. He thinks back toward the couch, the creatures skulking among the ruins, the rattling of a mysterious avatar’s footsteps where the horizon collapsed on itself. Something surveys the wasteland and demands more. It’s not enough that there’s a wasteland--there must be nothing, a void. 

And Martin considers nothingness. If suffering is a something, then it must not factor in. He sees himself in a gas mask. He sees himself leaning against one of many tall spikes bordering a nuclear waste zone. If he can’t save the world, he can end the one they’re in.)

Beside him, as they pull apart, Jon studies his profile, squinting. Martin doesn’t have to look at him to gather as much; there are different weights Jon’s eyes can effect and Martin’s learned them all. This one leans on worry, pokes at guilt, reaches desperately for something he can’t define.

“What do we do if we fail?” Martin says.

He watches Basira study the ground before her. Half the hardness they saw in the forest has faded and her white-knuckled fists twist into the dirt. The scream she buries in the knees of her pants leg scrapes the very air around her raw. 

“I… I’m talking…” Martin says, “You go up against Jonah, and it’s--he’s left standing and so are you. What then?”

“Well.” Jon sighs, rubs a finger in circles in a corner of his eye. “That’s not ‘we.’ That’s me, by myself.”

And Martin asks the stranger, “What was I ever going to do?”

He doesn’t answer him then, not when Basira is still throwing curses up toward the sky in Bengali and Arabic and flinging her arms wide while her gun’s held tight without paying the safety any mind. They wrestle the weapons out of her grip and latch on tight, holding her through it, the muddy sand underfoot staining the knees of their trousers. 

“It’s been ages and I _can’t find her_ ,” Basira sobs. “They feared me more than her in that forest, you know that? Where is she, then? What am I supposed to do?”

Jon catches Martin’s eye over her shoulder, and just as quickly they glance away. 

That’s it, isn’t it--Jon knows. Of course he knows. He knew when Trevor fixed his crosshairs on them, knew when Basira drew near, knew--on accident--some embarrassing moment from his last months of secondary school when they tried to fill the silence swapping stories. Jon knows and for once he’s holding that floodgate back instead of just blurting it out. 

“Jon…”

The look he shoots Martin is a warning, barbed but tinged with something else. Sadness, maybe, dulling the points before they land on his skin. The first thought, the one Martin wants to believe in, is that he holds back the knowledge out of kindness, sees Basira’s broken heart and hopes not to further ground it into dust. There’s others, too, ones more likely if he’s honest with himself: Jon holding back because he wants to feed off Basira’s spiking fear, Jon misdirecting because finding Daisy would ruin some plan of Jonah’s devising he’s secretly been stoking from the outset. 

He won’t hesitate, he said. He won’t hesitate trying to strike Jonah Magnus from the earth at long last, he said, and Martin holds the statement in his palm. Turns it over in the dull light, rubs a finger along the edges. He finds doubt there, sharp. It pricks his skin, a tiny bulb of red blooming toward the sky. Then, in that moment, should it come to pass, Martin is sure he would end the world-- _could_ end it. Will and ability don’t always go hand in hand but they would here. He can see it, the way his eyes fall to a matte black, the way acid bubbles and radiates out of his pores. 

Over Basira’s shoulder, Jon shoots him another look: brows knit, eyes shining. Concern. 

It’s then Basira shrugs them off, brushing the dirt from her trousers and stalking back toward where they’d dumped their packs. She mutters to herself, something like a theory, the heaving of her shoulders having jostled pieces into place, and Jon and Martin are left alone. The lake’s water laps close to where they kneel, stinking and sour. 

“What is it?” Martin finally snaps. 

“What are you seeing?” 

“What?”

“I…” Jon grabs his hand. “I can feel it. It--it’s stretching, or… I don’t know, _reaching_ for something--”

“Jon--”

“--and when I trace it back, it’s all wrapped around your heart.” Jon’s face crumples on itself, and he crawls forward on his knees, grasping Martin along the line of his jaw, kissing him like he first did in that Scottish forest--a plea, _come back, come back with me_. 

But where had they gone, except here? And where would they return to--Scotland, London, some other place they only knew through fantasy, a list of places to go before you die or the world ends in a writhing observant collapse. 

“Tell Basira,” Martin murmurs when they pull back to catch their breath. “Tell Basira where Daisy is or I’ll tell her all the doubt you--”

Jon kisses him quiet, tongue pressing against his to test the waters. “Okay… okay.” When he sits back on his ankles, taking Martin in, the curiosity sits higher than the fear, and Martin can hardly find itself within him to be surprised that fear is there at all. Close behind his eyes is the gas mask, the view of the wasteland falling away into the dark, and something is lighting the path to it under his feet.


End file.
